Constricting Snake Casino

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It’s difficult to know where to begin: good things 

are happening, and yet my horoscope predicts

pressure, pressure, and not luck, luck. Here’s the secret:

good things are always happening, but that doesn’t mean

the world ever stops constricting like a snake, that poverty 

ever stops making short work of it, of you, of everything. 

Life looks like a casino from far away, all lights and promise, 

but really can be summed up in the wish— fervent, constant— 

to win the lottery: the obsession with what difference

could be made, embarrassingly, by a thousand dollars.

Where to put the slow realization that I have to ignore 

these insane promises, to build a quiet life, to pretend 

poverty is manageable? Where to put this new routine 

of swimming on Tuesdays and Thursdays, tired little laps 

that go nowhere and yet I have to believe lead somewhere? 

Where to put the fact that I smoke weed, now, more weed 

than my straight-edge teenage self ever thought we’d see

in real life? Here’s the casino, the lights, the promise, 

the main event a wrestling match: me versus the feeling 

that I shouldn’t tell anyone about any of it: the poverty, 

the swimming, the marijuana I somehow crept into 

at age twenty-seven, ridiculous, really, and think 

of what it’s doing to your lungs, your past self, 

how you never thought you’d be that neighbour, 

coughing on the balcony every other night. 

 

It’s difficult to know where to begin, so let’s flip back

to the beginning of all this, or, at least, the beginning

of the realization that the casino was always a myth; 

here’s a portrait of myself in the spring, in the summer,

asleep in that narrow bedroom at the top of the stairs 

with the red blinds so faded that they keep nothing out.

I have yet to learn to swim; I have yet to roll a joint;

I am dreaming of winning the lottery. This moment 

is somehow made golden by memory, even though 

I was poor, then, too. And how poor of me, truly, 

to hear the neighbour downstairs coughing and think, 

Isn’t that sad? To live with your mother and smoke 

every night? Will he figure it out? Will he ever grow up? 

Here, now, from my seat in the constricting snake casino,

I realize: the cruelest action was to think I’d never change, 

that I was somehow better than anyone who did. 

And maybe this is the point of all my pitiful little laps

around the pool: to turn myself into a time machine, to swim 

my way back and smoke a joint with that kid downstairs.  

We’ll never win the lottery, I’ll say, but we can still be happy.

I’ll blow the smoke in my own window, lovingly, tenderly, 

like a warning, maybe, or something like forgiveness.

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